"On the downside I did not validate the unused side-structures. I think it is not necessary to validate data you are not using. So basically I only scan them so much as to find where they end. Granted it is a bit of optimization for a benchmark, but is actually handy in real-life as well."
Not really, because the only people that benefited from VW were Vw managers, whereas as a user I am quite happy to trade off speed for not validating useless fields when processing terabytes of JSON. And he is quite open about the tradeoff, so it's a perfect analogy except for what's different!
(Why so fast)
"On the downside I did not validate the unused side-structures. I think it is not necessary to validate data you are not using. So basically I only scan them so much as to find where they end. Granted it is a bit of optimization for a benchmark, but is actually handy in real-life as well."